I WAKE UP IN A CAR PARK IN POUGHKEEPSIE. THE DICE HAVE BEEN GIVEN ANOTHER ROLL, AND WE HAVE LANDED IN UPSTATE NEW YORK. TOMORROW NEW HAVEN, AND THEN ON TO BOSTON. I’M SITTING UP IN my bed in the car park with pale autumnal sunshine lighting a wan sky. The darkly veined acacia trees have almost lost their yellow leaves. One or two early risers are taking constitutionals. A lady in blue jeans with the face of Helen Mirren gets out of a gray Nissan. She smiles at her husband as she zips her coat against the chill. A dark-haired man in a leather jacket—who looks like he slept there all night—gets out of a small black car and brushes his hair with his hands. He lights a cigarette and heads off. A man with heavy eyelids, big cheeks, and soft protruding lips is taking a walk swathed in big old headphones. He has the face of James Baldwin. I once came face-to-face with that unforgettable face in the streets of St.-Paul-de-Vence, and his huge, intelligent eyes seemed to stare right through me—almost as remarkable a shock as seeing Salvador Dalí in the streets of New York. I remember getting very excited when Graham Greene boarded my flight from London to Nice. I immediately wrote a postcard to Michael, saying “I am flying with Graham Greene.” I have been happy to see quite a bit of Salman Rushdie. He is very funny in my Rutles sequel Can’t Buy Me Lunch (still unavailable from Warner Television). When I was an undergraduate at Cambridge in the sixties, someone pointed out a very old man, bent over a walking cane, emerging from Kings College.
“That’s E. M. Forster,” they said.
Impossible: surely he has been dead for years? His last novel was published in 1926. But it was the great man himself. Even the famous are not averse to bathing in the company of the famous. Stephen Spender once told me frankly he preferred the famous: “They are more interesting,” he explained. These were the days when I would have dinner with Gerry Durrell in his brother Lawrence’s house near Nîmes, in Provence. (I might as well go all out if I am literary name-dropping.) But we are all fascinated by the famous, aren’t we?
I get the runner to show me a bit of Poughkeepsie en route to lunch at the River Station, a nice bright pubby place with a spectacular view of the Hudson. The trees haven’t yet turned here, save for a few outrageous maples burning bright orangered against the placid Hudson below the picture window of the restaurant. Thirty years ago Poughkeepsie literally burned their bridges when the giant railway bridge caught fire.
How does a bridge burn? I ask.
“Wooden,” they replied.
There are pictures of it belching smoke on the walls of the restaurant. It still survives, its massive black box girders spanning the wide river, mirrored half a mile away by an elegant suspension bridge called the FDR. There are plans to open up a walkway across the blackened remnants of the burned-out bridge.
“Suicide leap?” I ask.
“Something like that,” says the lady in the restaurant.
The Bardavon Opera House is like me: old, elegant, and beautifully restored. The hall is packed with history, from Mark Twain to Harry Houdini, to George Burns and Gracie Allen, to Frank Sinatra. It dates from 1869 and has a wooden dome hidden upstairs and a ghost called Roger. Apparently he is an old stage manager who wandered onto the stage in the wild west days and was shot by one of the customers. He is a friendly ghost, and has on one occasion saved the theater from fire by pointing out its location to the stage crew. I wonder why ghosts aren’t more friendly? For example, why are ghosts never nude? Either they have a silly sheet on, or they are fully clothed, or they are skeletons. Why not a healthy nude lady ghost?
“And over here we have naked Sal, the very friendly gal….”
Heidi the headless lap dancer would make a very popular haunt. But no, it’s all rattle your chains and flounce about in sixteenth-century costume…
We record our madrigal to donate to a charity CD to raise money for the restoration of the theater.
There was a ship that put to sea
All in the month of May
With a fa la la la
With a fa la la la
With a fa la la la la lay
In the month of May
The merry month of May
And the ship that put to sea
In the month of May
In the month of May
Fa la la Fa la lay
The ship that put to sea in the month of
May…sank!10